Bleeding London

DOCTOR

Dr Graham Pryce, number five on Mick Wilton’s list, liked to tie up his wife. It was a thing that gave him a curious and largely inexplicable pleasure and he had no desire to have it explained. The textbooks he’d read on the subject suggested that it ought to be the other way round, that he should want to be tied. He spent all his days making serious, life and death decisions. He performed operations, thoracic surgery in the main. It was high stress, intensive care. There were junior doctors, nurses, administrators to be bullied. The failures, though much less frequent than the successes, couldn’t be easily shrugged off. There were spouses and relatives, parents and offspring to be dealt with; sometimes they were weeping, sometimes they were litigious. Sometimes they were in need of counselling, more often they were in need of and were prescribed a good dose of tranquillizer. Dr Pryce took a masculine, professional pride in appearing to cope effortlessly with all the above.

So after a hard day he should, if he were following the classic scenario, wish to abandon all power, should wish to submit totally and become helpless. He should want someone, a wife, mistress, maîtresse, to take complete control. But he did not. He left the submission to his wife, Louise. Not that the submission was completely straightforward. Within the rules they set themselves she was perfectly entitled to struggle a little, to fight, to beat his chest with her fists, dig her nails into his back, to threaten him with vengeance, police, with the wrath of the BMA. For Pryce’s profession was of paramount importance in their sexual games. His wife played the vulnerable, needy, hypochondriac patient and he played the wicked, invasive, unethical swine of a general practitioner. It was a satisfactory arrangement for both of them.

They lived in inherited splendour in a Georgian town house off Fitzroy Square. They liked to think of themselves as Fitzrovians; as heirs to the streets of Augustus John, Sickert, Hazlitt, Charles Laughton; as tolerant historical neighbours of the likes of Dylan Thomas, Nina Hamnett, Marie Stopes. Their living quarters were in the upper reaches of the house, the ground floor being used as a reception area and consulting room for Pryce’s growing roster of private patients.

The consulting room was a comfortable, reassuring place, one that spoke of discreet money and good health. The room was warm and richly wallpapered. There were leather chairs for both doctor and patient, a wide Axminster rug on the floor, glass-fronted bookcases containing medical textbooks. There were no images of sickness, no stark posters warning patients about disease and distress. Instead there were framed engravings of London buildings, and although a closer look would have revealed that these were in fact London hospitals: Guy’s, Bart’s, St Thomas’s, the Brompton, this room seemed to offer the promise that associations with such establishments would be cordial and brief. Tucked away close to the filing cabinets was a small engraving of Bedlam, but patients never saw that one at all.

Any transaction that took place here would be costly, and yet the doctor who inhabited this room was clearly rich enough that he wouldn’t need to rob you. The service delivered would be expensive and honourable. Inevitably, therefore, this room had to be the venue for the Pryces’ erotic games.

Once in a while, as often as their mutual needs and tastes coincided, Pryce would book his wife in for the last appointment of the day, and he would send his nurse home early.

Having been out all afternoon, Louise would come to the house as though she were a bona fide patient, and Pryce would let her in and show her through to his consulting room.

His manner would start out reserved and thoroughly professional, although a patient might notice that his tie was loose and that there was the merest hint of malt whisky on his breath. He would listen sympathetically as Louise Pryce told her story, recounted vague symptoms of tiredness, anxiety, ennui. He would ask a few desultory questions about her diet, her sleep patterns, her libido, and then conclude that she was in need of a thorough examination.

She would go behind a screen and shyly remove a few of her clothes. When she had emerged he would bossily tell her to take off the rest (except for the stockings and suspender belt) and when she was a bit slow about it he’d lend a rough but practised hand to speed the process along.

She would stand before him, denuded, eyes downcast, while he took her pulse, while he touched various parts of her body with his fingers and with the cold end of his stethoscope. He would feel her breasts to make sure ‘everything was all right in that department’ and, once convinced, he would conclude that her problem must lie elsewhere.

He’d slip on surgical gloves and tell her to hop up on to the examination table where he would brusquely spread her legs and begin an internal examination. The touch of rubber-encased fingers, of swabs and speculum, would make her feel that she was melting. Her husband was taking over and she was blissfully losing power. But when he started peering deeply into her, getting his nose and mouth so close that she could feel his breath on her labia, well, a decent woman surely had to protest. She would express a certain lady-like outrage, but that would only bring out the worst in her doctor.

Before she knew it he’d have abandoned his pleasant bedside manner and he’d be buckling leather straps across her midriff, using lengths of bandage to bind her wrists and ankles to the table. A broad piece of sticking plaster would be slapped tightly and immovably over her mouth. Then, when she was totally restrained, totally vulnerable, totally at his sexual mercy, he would step back, do up his tie, straighten his jacket, and say that was enough for one day. He would turn off the lamp on his desk, gather together a few papers and slide them into his briefcase. Then he would go to the door, turn off the overhead light and be gone. His wife would be left there in the dark, bound and splayed, and she would stay like that in a state of ominous, rising sexual tension until Pryce saw fit to return.

By the time he got back, up to an hour later, they would both be in states of headlong arousal. He would return, rush into the consulting room, flail his clothes aside and fuck her where she was, bonds still in place, her mouth still taped shut. The coupling was blind and short, and afterwards, when the whole act was finished, he would release her, let her dress, say the treatment might need repeating quite soon, and then the game would be over. They would go up into the body of the house, open a decent bottle of wine and have a casserole that she had prepared earlier. Domesticity and decency were once again restored.

Mick had seen only part of the performance, the public side. He’d watched Louise Pryce arriving at the house and he’d found it strange that she had to ring the bell to be admitted to her own home. He found it stranger still that after a while all the lights were turned off and that Pryce then left the building. Mick knew that the wife must still be in there, in the dark, and although it just about seemed possible that she had simply decided to go to bed, take an early-evening nap, Mick felt sure there must be a more potent and enticing explanation, one that he could use to his advantage.

Mick was keen to get on with his task. He would be glad when he was finished. He felt he might be losing his taste for revenge. His life was getting too difficult and convoluted. Sleeping with Judy Tanaka had been a terrible mistake, worse than he’d first thought. Love, lust, affection, attraction, desire, need; these were the things that made life complicated and intolerable. They were traps. They threatened to involve him, to enmesh him in the workings of a city where he did not want to belong. He had wanted to be unknown in London, to be invisible, anonymous, to move in and out swiftly and unobserved. Things had changed. He was feeling bogged down, static, and it made him want to hurry, to detach himself, get away from Judy, and that perhaps more than anything else was what spurred him into a rash, improvised revenge against Pryce.

Having seen the outer manifestations of the Pryces’ variety act he now wanted to see the whole story. He had set himself up outside the house. He had watched Louise Pryce arrive and enter, seen the lights go off, seen Pryce leave. Mick decided it was time to go in. He knew this was not strictly wise. He knew that Pryce was not there and it would probably have made more sense to be out in the streets following him. Yet something told Mick that the appropriate act of revenge would take place in the Pryces’ own home.

Breaking in presented no problems. Once inside the house he began switching on lights. He’d had enough of subterfuge, of hiding and sneaking. He would have illuminated the whole house and walked freely around all of it, intruding, trespassing, searching for nothing in particular. But there was no need. The first room he came to was the consulting room, and there she was, Mrs Louise Pryce, just as her husband had left her; naked and trussed. Mick had not been expecting anything so extreme, so theatrical as this, and yet in the event it came as no great surprise. It made sense. It fitted.

His first impulse was to untie the poor woman, let her get dressed, tell her he was there for her husband, not for her. But at the same time he saw that there must be possibilities in having his victim’s wife bound, gagged and stripped, before him.

She looked at him fearfully, but there was far more in her eyes than simple fright. There was disbelief and many, many shades of embarrassment that were quite separate from the natural shock she was experiencing.

“Mrs Pryce, I presume,” Mick said cheerfully.

He looked closely at her body. He liked the look of it, the tight stomach, the small breasts with their dark pink nipples. Her skin was pale, and paler still where a bikini had protected areas from the sun, protected too a neat, wholesome-looking appendix scar close to her right hip bone. The patches of thigh visible above the top of her stockings were smooth and seemed, to Mick, to be crying out to be touched. Her pubic hair was short and trim, and he wondered if it had been cut that way to satisfy her husband’s tastes.

“Is there any money here?” he asked.

She was trying to be helpful. She nodded towards her handbag which was lying on the floor by her husband’s desk. Mick opened it, explored among the lipsticks and tissues and bunches of keys and found a purse with a couple of hundred pounds in it. He took the money gratefully.

“Thanks for helping to make my stay in London just that little bit more pleasurable,” he said.

Then she tried to be more helpful still. Her eyes flicked round the room, and settled on a metal cabinet with a rolling front. She seemed to be directing him there. Mick opened the cabinet and found it full of drugs samples. He turned away immediately.

“Not my thing,” he said by way of explanation. “I suppose I could try and sell them but I wouldn’t know one drug from another. Would you?”

He hoped that this brief interaction might help to make Louise Pryce a little less scared, but it didn’t work. He needed to say more. He said, “I imagine it must be strange being married to a doctor, knowing that he spends all day messing about with other people’s bodies, examining them, poking around in them, seeing all these tits and bums and all the labias and vulvas. And then he conies home to you. It must be weird for you. God knows there are a lot of sick people out there.

“The body’s such a strange thing, isn’t it, Mrs Pryce? It gives a lot of pleasure but it can give a lot of pain too. I mean, I intend to hurt your husband, and OK, I might think about hurting him mentally or emotionally, but let’s face it, the body’s what you think of hurting first, isn’t it?”

That didn’t do much to relax the woman either. He wanted to be reassuring. He said, “I can see that you’re frightened, Mrs Pryce, and I can understand why. There you are, all spread out like a road map, and here I am, and let’s face it, the road looks wide open. I mean, if I were someone like your husband I’d probably be right in there, no messing, straight into the Dartford Tunnel. That’s the kind of man your husband is, so I hear, or so they tell me. They say he’s the kind of man who gang-bangs strippers at private patties, at least that’s what they say about him in Sheffield. You look surprised. You probably didn’t think people in Sheffield talked about your husband. Well, it came as a bit of a shock to me too.”

The expression on her face was developing, maturing, changing from one of simple fear and confusion to a more complicated anguish, as it dawned on her that she might be in the presence of a genuine, dangerous lunatic.

“Frankly, Mrs Pryce, you’re a good-looking woman. No man in his right mind would kick you out of bed. But the problem I have is this: I want revenge on your husband and a lot of people would think that having sex with you would be a pretty good way of doing it. But I don’t know. I’d have to put my penis into a place where he normally puts his penis and that would be a bit disgusting, wouldn’t it?

“Now you might say that since your husband raped my girlfriend I’m forced to put my penis where he’s already had his, in any case, so I admit the issue isn’t all that clear. And I admit that unless you sleep exclusively with virgins you’re always going into a hole where some dodgy prick has been before you, so maybe that’s not really the issue, but anyway, the important thing is I’m not a rapist. Really I’m not. I mean, there are a lot of men, men who’d call themselves non-rapists, ordinary petty criminals, burglars, who if they broke into a house and found themselves in this position, well, they just couldn’t control themselves. But I’m not like that, you’ll be glad to know.

“And in any case, raping you because your husband raped my girlfriend, well, that’s not much of a revenge really, is it? If I was really going to rape someone I ought to rape him, didn’t I? I mean, that would be real revenge. Apparently there’s a lot of it about these days, maybe there always was but you hear a lot more about it now. It puts ideas into people’s heads.

“Of course, there are other things I could do to you that would be a long way short of rape that might piss off your husband every bit as much. Just having your wife seen naked by another man, that’d be enough to make some husbands feel angry and humiliated. But I was thinking of something more concrete. I mean, maybe if I just touched your breasts, stroked your nipples. Would they get hard, I wonder? Or I could stroke your fanny, only the outside at first and then maybe slip a finger in just for size, just testing the waters. Or maybe I should masturbate while I look at you. A lot of husbands would think that was a bit much. I’d be just standing here copping an eyeful, pulling the old pudding, and maybe just before I came I’d get up on the table and ejaculate all over you so that you got sperm on your belly and breasts and on your face and in your hair. Not in your mouth, of course, thanks to the sticking plaster. And when your husband got back he’d see this spunk all over you and he’d have to help you clean it off…”

The thought was so headily indecent that he had to stop talking for a moment. Then he continued, “But really, Mrs Pryce, you’ll be glad to hear I’m not going to do any of that stuff to you, because I think it’s morally wrong to get at a man through his wife or his children. I’m not a monster, Mrs Pryce, as you must have realized by now.

“You know, I always wonder about the sort of low-life villains who steal old ladies’ life savings, or threaten to kill people’s children, or who throw acid in the caretaker’s face. I mean, I say to myself, how can they do that? I think in most cases the answer is because they have no imagination. They can’t imagine what it’s like to be old or to have children or to have your face disfigured, because if they could imagine it they’d have some empathy with the victims and so they couldn’t bring themselves to do it. I think I can imagine more or less what it’s like to be raped, so I wouldn’t do that to you.

“But then I think about real villains, the real monsters. They do have imagination. They’re good at thinking up tortures that you and I could never ever possibly dream of. I was reading something in the papers, can’t remember where it was, Bosnia or Rwanda or Nicaragua or somewhere like that, where they’d capture men, fathers and sons, take them to gaol and then force them to give each other blow jobs.

“To me that’s more than just sick, it’s actually unimaginable. If I’d been given the rest of my life to think up something horrible to do to one of my enemies I’d never have come up with that. Never. So, maybe I’m wrong, maybe some of these guys do have imagination.”

Mick was aware that Louise Pryce seemed to be watching him closely, listening very carefully to what he was saying. He hardly thought she was interested in the philosophy of criminality, and he wondered if maybe she was just staring at him, listening to his voice, trying to commit things to memory that she could later recount to the police. But no, he couldn’t quite see that happening, couldn’t imagine the Pryces explaining to some honest constable how it was that she came to be in a position to be such a good observer.

“I’d be quite interested in hearing your replies, Mrs Pryce,” he said. “But you understand why I haven’t taken off the sticking plaster. Because I’m scared you’ll scream the place down.”

She shook her head to say that she wouldn’t do that, but how could he believe her?

“The simple fact is,” he said, “I feel tired, Mrs Pryce. I find this city of yours pretty exhausting. It’s easy to get lost. And frankly, Mrs Pryce, I’m feeling a bit lost. I mean, when I arrived in London it all seemed very clear; six guys who needed sorting out. No problem. That’s the line of work I’m in. That’s what I do. And you know, it ought to be easy giving these blokes a pasting. I mean, some of them I’d have been happy to do anyway, that prat Jonathan Sands and his bloody boat, that bloody actor. I mean, I have my share of class hatred. I don’t mind beating up rich, posh bastards at all. I’d do that any day of the week. But lately it’s not been that simple. I have this funny feeling that something’s wrong somewhere.

“Yeah, when I first came here I hated London and I hated the people who lived here; too soft, too rich, too southern. But lately it’s not been that straightforward. For instance, I like cars, I find them interesting, and London’s full of interesting cars. You see lots of left-hand-drive cars for instance. And you can see more Rolls-Royces in London in a day than you’d see in Sheffield in a year. And you see Ferraris and old Bristols and Maseratis. And obviously it’s partly a question of money, obviously there’s more cash around in London than in Sheffield, but somehow it’s more than that. People here like things that are a bit different, a bit special. Even that twat Philip Masterson had a decent car.

“And women too. You see more beautiful women in London than you’d ever see anywhere else in England. Maybe sheer numbers has got something to do with it, the population of London’s so big there have to be a few great-looking women, but it feels like there’s a much higher percentage in London. And the way they dress. Some of the clothes they wear — they’d stop traffic if they dressed like that in Sheffield, but in London it’s just part of the show. I like it. I’m a sucker for all that.”

He picked up the speculum that Pryce had used to examine his wife and held it up to the light. He closed one eye and looked at the world through the curved, distorting plastic.

“If this thing could talk,” he muttered distractedly, then returned to what he was saying. “It’s funny but I suppose I’ve started to like this place. London. I like the money and the variety and the river and the desirable properties. I like the pubs and the architecture and the people and the restaurants. And inevitably a bit of me is envious. And you know there was a time when envy would have made me want to destroy things, but it doesn’t feel like that now. Now I want…I know it sounds stupid…I want to join in with it.

“As a matter effect, I’ve never really felt as though I belonged anywhere, Mrs Pryce, and it never bothered me. I’m not sure if I belong in London or not, but now I’m here I don’t really want to go back to Sheffield. And it’s troubling me. You know, how is a petty criminal from up north supposed to fit in to all this?

“Sex is the problem, Mrs Pryce. Sex is always at the back of everything. I slept with a woman, a Londoner, and suddenly I’m all confused. Bodies are such a problem. They say that the human body’s like a city, in all sorts of ways, and I’m sure they’re right.”

Mick went to one of the glass-fronted bookcases and pulled out a copy of Gray’s Anatomy. He turned through the pages until he found what he was looking for.

“The first cut is the deepest, eh, Mrs Pryce?” he said.

There was a thick red felt-tip pen lying on Pryce’s desk. Mick picked it up, went over to Louise Pryce and, with reference to the book he’d opened, he painstakingly drew a large, red, valentine heart on the surface of her breast and sternum. The skin resisted the pen. The flesh sank beneath the pressure of the felt-tip but Mick was scrupulous in ensuring that only the pen should touch her, that there should be no skin to skin contact.

“Yes, a city can have a heart but I don’t know where London’s heart is. Marble Arch? The square mile of the City? Knightsbridge? And where are the lungs? Where’s the liver? The kidneys?”

He drew sketchy representations of lungs, liver, kidneys and a length of colon on the skin of Louise Pryce’s thorax. She couldn’t scream and she could barely struggle but something in her eyes showed absolute terror, as if she thought he might be about to slash her open, perform some butcher’s incision in search of a heart.

—“I’m not going to hurt you, Mrs Pryce,” Mick said again. “I know that drawing on your chest with felt-tip is a pretty weird thing to do. It’s true. I feel pretty weird these days. I am weird. But I’m not a nutter. Thanks for being such a good listener, Mrs Pryce.”

He pulled up a chair, placed it close to the examination table and sat there for a long time just looking at her body. There was pleasure in it. He liked to look but he had no desire to touch. He tried to imagine that he was looking at a city, at a new-found land, but all he saw was flesh and sex.

He was still sitting and looking when he heard sounds from the hall; the front door opening, then a man’s footsteps. The return of Dr Graham Pryce. He must surely have realized at once that something was amiss since all the lights were on and the door to the consulting room was open. But even though he was forewarned, he was hardly ready for what hit him.

The moment Pryce entered the consulting room, before he had time to take in the scene, before he was even fully aware of Mick’s presence, Mick started to punch and kick him. He did it silently, without saying a word, without so much as grunting. Pryce had no chance to fight back, not even to defend himself. The blows came from some dark place deep inside Mick, a place of cold, frightening, irresistible violence.

Pryce folded under the blows, was driven down to his knees, then to the floor, where he rolled up into a ball, not struggling, merely enduring, waiting for the attack to cease or to drive him into insensibility. And as Mick’s right foot made repeated contact with his victim’s body, he looked over at Louise Pryce, still pegged out on the table, and he could see she was crying, not much, just enough to make him feel bad, just enough to make him stop kicking her husband.

Mick stood still, trying not to sway, not to fall over, sweat pumping out through the creases in his forehead, an oceanic wash in his ears, and before he made his escape he felt the compulsion to turn apologetically to Louise Pryce and say, “If it’s any consolation I don’t really know why I did that.” And even then he still wasn’t ready to go. He went over to her and said, “You know another way the body and the city resemble each other? Answer: neither of them has a soul.”